Does this chart (from the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis) look downward trending to YOU?

It does to republicans.

Remember Obama came into office with the economy in the tank, the banking system and the auto industry about to collapse, and unemployment already skyrocketing* after eight years of Bush Admin. mismanagement that had taken the country from a $230 billion dollar surplus when Clinton left office to a $1.3 trillion dollar deficit when Bush left office. It takes a while to turn the economy around and recover after a train wreck like Bush left behind but quite obviously progress is being made on recovery. If the corrupt republican greed freaks and plutocratic power trippers get back into control, expect to see this chart in the coming years look even worse than it looks here in 2009. The ride will be a lot rougher than the Bush years. If Romoney and Lyin' Ryan win, expect to see more wars in the Mideast, huge gas price hikes, more tax cuts for the super rich and the corporations, higher taxes for the middle class and even the poor, more profitable (for them) destruction of the economy and exporting of jobs, a ban on legal abortion and suppression of the availability of contraception supplies and information, more assaults on everyone's freedoms and rights, more packing the judiciary with far right wing ideologues which means more twisting of the laws to favor the top 1% at the expense of the rest of us. Give Obama a chance and the recovery seen here will continue and grow stronger. Let's give him a majority in the House and a 60 plus majority in the Senate while we're at it and the things we need to happen to grow our economy and compete in the global market can get done without all of the organized Republican obstructionism that we've all seen for the last four years. The right wing has repeatedly shown a willingness to see the country go down the tubes rather than let Obama accomplish anything. In spite of that, he's accomplished quite a lot.

* "unemployment already skyrocketing" - FactCheck.org reports this: Repeated Job Loss ClaimRomneys claim that Obama stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history is also wrong, as weve noted before. The truth is more jobs were lost under Bush than Obama, and most of the jobs lost since he took office have now been regained. Since we wrote about this last year, the BLS has revised its statistics slightly for improved accuracy, as it does every year. The latest data show that total nonfarm employment (the standard measure of jobs) declined by nearly 8.8 million between its most recent peak in January 2008 and when the job slump bottomed out more than two years later, in February 2010. Of those lost jobs, nearly 4.5 million disappeared while Bush was president, and just over 4.3 million vanished during Obamas first 13 months in office. And since the job totals hit bottom there have been slow and steady gains, totaling nearly 3.6 million jobs. The total for March (released April 6) stood just 740,000 short of where it was in January 2009 when Obama was inaugurated.

You could have saved yourself some time by remembering the number of millions out of work and those who have given up and "left" the work force all together ... in the last 4 long years.

Click to expand...

Too bad the right wing has ceased to be reality based.

The same system of computing these job numbers has been used by all of the previous Presidents. The system is not perfect and it can miss some of the people who have left the workforce and are no longer looking for a job but it still works pretty good and reveals some trends in the economy. The results are based on household surveys. The trend the figures reveal is clearly demonstrated in the chart in the OP.

The jobs numbers truther movement
Politico.com
By PATRICK REIS
10/5/12
(excerpts)A cadre of conservatives from Jack Welch to Allen West are crying conspiracy over Fridays good economic news, accusing the White House of cooking the books to boost President Barack Obamas prospects for reelection. The word from Republicans who have worked with the jobs numbers before? Bunk. The numbers are put together by trained professionals and in a process that keeps politicians from interfering, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a chief economic adviser to former President George W. Bush. Any sort of suggestion to the contrary is wrong. Former Bush administration spokesman Tony Fratto took to Twitter to say: Stop with the dumb conspiracy theories. Good grief.

The monthly jobs report produces a duo of headline numbers: a payroll jobs number and the rate of unemployment. Fridays flap mostly revolves around the drop in the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. The unemployment rate is measured separately from the headline job number, the 114,000 reported Friday, and uses an alternate count of jobs that comes from a survey of households. That household survey measured 873,000 jobs  way above the payroll jobs number result of 114,000, which comes from a survey of employers. But economists say the gap between the payroll and household jobs count does not suggest foul play, but is rather a product of the statistical difficulty of counting jobs in a 300 million-person economy. In July, for instance, the two surveys were nearly 400,000 jobs apart, this time with the payroll survey showing much greater growth than the tally used to compute the unemployment rate.

A look at the process used to get the numbers  as well as a bit of recent history  suggests the conspiracy claims belong in the same category as questions about Obamas birth certificate. The national unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a nonpartisan agency composed of career economists and statisticians that currently employees zero political appointees. The agency is typically directed by an appointee  the only appointed position in the entire organization  but that seat has sat vacant since Bush-pick Keith Hall left in January when his term expired. The September figure came from a method identical to the one the bureau used to calculate previous months, said agency spokesman Gary Steinberg. The figure always comes out on the first Friday of the month, and it is kept private from the White House until the evening before.

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